Not really a food item...

But one of my orchids is blooming and another has a flower stalk. It's very pretty in the dining room.

Holiday #1

Okay, work exploded I got in gear to student teach starting next month and then all of the sudden it's the middle of December and I'm leaving town for X-mas in no time and the blog hasn't been updated in two months!

Heavens. So let's talk about Thanksgiving.



My family doesn't always do a turkey. I'm an only child so it's not like 40 people are showing up. I actually did my first one last year; and was quite pleased with it even did the full on brining and gravy based on drippings and homemade stock. This time around my folks brought along a venison ham. I left for work Wednesday with my dad standing over the roast with a hacksaw and my knives and came back to a beautifully butterflied roast.

I did a seasoning rub with salt, pepper, juniper berries and thyme. Smeared sauteed mushroom and shallots along the inside and then rolled it. (Note the Food Loop...garish pink but more silicon cleverness!) Needed to add bacon to counter the meat's leaness.




Finished with a basic pan sauce, broth, port and dried cherry. Not so shabby.

Twisty Potato

There is apparantly a market for certain odd veggies. This was in a basket of sweet potatoes from the market. It does not feature Elvis or the Virgin Mary so I will probably have to settle for having it for dinner, but I thought it was rather nifty anyhow.

Itchy Feet

The threatened turn in the weather in coming days set me off this weekend on seasonal housecleaning binge, which in my case means finding room for the houseplants that grew too much during the summer on the porch and shaking out\off travel collected textiles and images. Which gave me a small case of itchy fet (made worse by just having finished The Great Railroad Bazaar).

In lieu of pulling out my pack, I settled for cooking new parents a batch of a Moroccan lamb stew: lamb marinated with garlic, lemon zest and lemon\orange juice. Browned onions with saffron, coriander, cumin and thyme. Pinenuts, tomato and raisins. A splash of red wine and cooked and cooked and cooked. And an Indian themed lunchbox for myself this week. Which is very good, but makes me want to take a nap in the afternoon.

Fashionable Dining

When I was in college many of my favorite clothes were based on the notion of dressing like a 1950's Juvenile Delinquent: a vintage black cardigan with appliquéd roses, leopard print heels, gray pedal pushers, rolled jeans, wide skirted old dresses accessorized with red lipstick, silver cat's eye sunglasses, and my hair in a ponytail.

My mother bit her tongue.

I find myself having a similar reaction as I watch the trendy young 18-20 years olds on the train with their leggings and plastic jewelry and big earrings.

I think fashion's basic rule is that if you thought it looked cool in junior high, it's dead to you forever.

I'm not sure if food trends work the same way, but I'm having a bit of 1970's food lapse here. Maybe it's backlash to the retro 80's thing that keeps popping up or maybe it's just because it's fall. Today I made a nice, albeit unfashionable, batch of an autumnal granola:

• 3 cups oats
• 1 cup almonds
• 1/2 unsweetened flaked coconut
• maple syrup
• Cinnamon
• Nutmeg
• Dried cranberries (with some orange in them courtesy of Trader Joe's)
  

Preheat the oven to 300F. Put the roasting pan on the burners toss the first three ingredients adding one at a time until you can smell them. Drizzle with maple syrup and add cinnamon and nutmeg. Stir stir stir! Put in the oven for 20 minutes (stir twice). Take out and add dried fruit and let cool.

Ghee, that was easy.

Oh, that's a mighty bad pun right there. Sorry (but not very).

Anyhoo, I've been continuing my little Indian cooking project here and there and even did a little class last week. In the cookbooks I've picked up and in my poking around everyone talks about critical ingredients and how it's a different set of things than most Western cooking. And people talk about how you can't make India food without ghee and make it sound like you have to take a special trip to Little India on Devon to get it.

This is silly. Know what ghee is? Butter without the 14% water of most American butters. Know how to turn your butter into ghee? Melt it. When it stops sputtering take it off the heat, let it cool and pour in a jar.

Some Pig! Or, Happy Pigs Make Good Eating!

As I mentioned, I picked up a ham hock at the market recently. It was sold to me by a sweet Mennonite couple with an array of happy creatures that eat well and wander freely before meeting their demise.
Well, I defrosted it for this weekend for a batch of split pea soup and wowza! I mean, look at that thing! It looks like some magazine cover roast. Typically, you don't get much out of a ham hock except some smoky notes and a few grisly bits. But this was a whole seperate deal. This guy was unsmoked, but bursting with flavor. Two pounds total weight with a high ratio of tender pork that fell into the soup. The meat dealers come but once a month with their wares so I'll have to get a couple more of these for the freezer.
Thank you pig!

Evolution

I started cooking when I was in college and moved into my first apartment with roommates from my dorm. I had an pretty limited repertoire, but I sort of fumbled around. I knew that I liked to cook and I came from a family that cooked so I tended to work with fresh foods...or at least throw them into my ramen. But, when I really started working in the kitchen was when I moved to Minneapolis for a few years of grad school. I headed out on my 21st birthday with three Wustof knives (a graduation present from my parents) some pans from Kmart, a beat-up paperback version of the Joy of Cooking, a copy of the Silver Palate with some notes from Mom in the back, Silver Palate New Basics and a blue spiral notebook that I'd copied some recipes in.

I pulled my notebook out the other day because I wanted to make White Chili; and I always forget something if I don't look at my notes. But I realized how much the recipe had changed as I've made it for 11 years.

When I was 21 it looked like this:

• 1 lb Boneless, skinless Turkey or Chicken
• 1/2 cup each carrots and celery
• 6 cups broth (at the time this meant buillon cubes--and not my homemade ones)
• 2 16oz cans navy beans
• 1 4oz can green chilies
• oregano
• cumin
• salt and pepper
• sour cream and shredded jack cheese to top
  

Simmer meat, vegetables in broth about 10 minutes. Drain all but one cup of liquid. Add the beans, chiles, spice and simmer 10 minutes. Top with sour cream and cheese.

At the ripe old age of 32 it looks like this:

• 1-1.5 lbs bone-on chicken breasts or quarters, skinned
• 1 1/2 cup dried white beans
• 4 cups real chicken broth
• 1/2 cup each carrots and celery
• Whatever herbs are around (oregano, thyme, bay leaf)
• Salt\Pepper
• Cumin
• 1 4 oz can of chiles
• 2 Limes
• Chipotle
• sour cream and shredded cheddar cheese

Soak the beans. Put chicken at bottom of heavy pan, add veggies and herbs, pour over beans with soaking water and chicken broth. Simmer for about an hour. Pull out chicken to cool. Add
the chilies, cumin, salt and pepper. Let the beans keep cooking. When chicken is cool, pull off the bone and shred by hand. Use immersion blender to puree the beans just a *touch* stir chicken back in with juice from the limes and chipotle sauce to taste. Top with sour cream and cheese.

It's much better now.

Salad-on-Noodles

When I was living in the Netherlands I had lots of time to play around with in the kitchen. One evening I had a really lovely warm goat cheese salad that I reimaged a few days later as a pasta dish with a pile of suateed spinach, goat cheese rounds from the oven on top with lots of olive oil and garlic and shallots.

I went down a similar path with my market beets from the weekend. Rather than tossing them into a salad I diced them and threw them into pasta with cheese and shallots a bit of butter and cana de capra. Good concept but a couple of changes: possibly roast beets a bit longer than I normally would for salads. I did kale on the side because that's what was in the fridge but maybe sauteed beet greens thrown in there on top of the pasta?

Adults Only

I got home from the market this morning and realized that, aside from some Honeycrisp apples, I filled my basket with a shockingly kid unfriendly roster. My goodies included:

• Kale
• Beets
• Bitter Salad Greens

And because the Mennonite farmers with the happy animals were there:

• Lamb Kidneys
• Chicken Livers
• Pork Hocks

Yikes! Take that Chicken Nuggets.

I'm thinking roasted beets for salad with goat cheese and also a little 70's gourmet retro Chicken Liver Pate (which I *did* like as a kid, but I know better than to consider that normal).

The kidneys I'm still trying to suss out what to do with. When I worked in a French restaurant as a waitress we'd periodically run a kidney special that wouldn't sell and then wind up eating kidneys as the staff meal just before they went off. I just have a small packet (and they're frozen) so I'm thinking of maybe doing a classic pan sauce with mustard and cream but then adding a pile of mushrooms. hmmm, there's duxelles in the freezer too...

Sometimes being a grown-up is okay.

Pork 'n' Beans

I consider it rather unfortunate that "pork 'n' beans" has become associated with cafeterias, sickly sweet orange sauce and junior high fart jokes. Because when fall comes around it's actually quite a fantastic combination.

I'm somewhere around three to four weeks behind at work and the stack keeps growing. I'd gone in to do some catch-up on Sat. for a few hours and I had noble intentions to go in for a while on (ack) Sunday. But at the market these caught my eye and were sitting in the fridge:


I decided that, really, there were better ways to live and I would just be behind Monday. So I sat down at the table and shelled the cranberry beans. Wow, they were crazy beautiful before they were cooked: fat and marbled red and white. Then I rendered fat from some bacon and sauteed onion, celery and fresh herbs from the porch (rosemary, thyme) deglazed with a little sherry* and threw in the beans with sundried tomato and let 'er simmer. It was one of those sort of thrown together improvisations that was soothing and a nice reminder of why I like fooling around in the kitchen so much. Take that Van Camp's.

*Actually rot-gut Chinese cooking rice wine from the Thai Market that is a surprisingly effective substitute. But it doesn't sound quite as nice. And you certainly don't want to sip it.

Kiss the Cryin' Good-bye

I am a serious onion weeper. It usually starts when I'm peeling them and then continues until they've been stirred into something and have been sauteed into submission. Previously, the only means I found of avoiding the onion weeping was when Brandon gave me googles to wear. Although effective, it did have the negative side effect of making me sort of blind since I don't have prescription googles. Plus there was the whole looking very stupid thing.

While working in the kitchen this morning the crying started with the peeling when I remembered hearing somewhere along the line that burning a small candle near your cutting board would draw away the sulfer fumes and reduce the weepies. So I tried it. Big improvement over normal and these were strong, fresh farmers market onions so this might become a regular practice.

Figs? On Pizza? Oh, yes!

I tend to think of recipes as a starting point rather than a set of rules to be followed. This is probably why I lean towards savory cooking rather than baking since baking requires a certain amount of obedience in order to avoid a pile of wet flour.

About a week ago, the paper appeared with a recipe for a pizza with fig and prosciutto. Being an enthusiastic fan of figs, I liked the notion but didn’t really approve of the idea of using fig jam as a base on the dough and provolone. It made the dish seem overwhelmed by sweet and creamy, more like a dessert than something for dinner.

For a while I’ve used Silver Palate’s pizza dough recipe (by the rules, yes, yes) but this time I tried Lynn Rossetto Kasper’s instructions. Sticky and a pain in the ass to work but WAAAAY better results. I even got bubbles in the crust like a real pizzeria.

Anyway, on top:

• Brushed the crust with olive oil and lightly sprinkled finely minced fresh rosemary
• Shaved a little parmesan over that
• Sliced figs and proscuitto
• Crumbles of blue cheese tucked in

And that, my friends, is a pizza worth making again served with a cheap Italian red on an autumn night.

Hot Tomatoes!

ooohhh, summer.
Deborah Madison in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone has a very basic oven roasted tomato sauce that I used as a starting inspiration for my own standard sauce that makes it way into the freezer in little packets to be pulled out when the snow’s gray and I really, really need a little bit of late summer in my life.

Heat oven to 350/375 F.
Slice enough REAL tomatoes in half to fill the roasting pan.
Quarter onions and tuck in the gaps.
Sprinkle the with salt.
Pick some thyme from the porch and dangle branches over the tomatoes.
Drizzle with a little olive oil.

Throw the lot in the oven and leave until the tomatoes start collapsing and getting a bit brown on the bottom, the onions are softening and your kitchen smells like heaven. (About an hour)

Pour in some red wine to deglaze the pan. Scrape along the bottom of the pan with a hard rubber spatula. Push everything into a big heavy pot. Let it cook on the stove at least until the liquids come out and preferably for a couple hours. I often will add a little tomato paste at this point.

Good on pasta. Plain or with a little cheese. Or some shrimp sauteed if you feel fancy.
Good under a plate of pesto encrusted salmon.
Good as a base for a pizza.
Just kinda good.

As the sauce mellows, add additional salt if needed and stir in several minced cloves of garlic and a handful of basil. Just before it goes of the heat entirely, throw in a couple more handfuls of basil.

This changes everything....

I loves myself a good piece of kitchen gear.

I am the sort of girl who will curl up on the couch on a cold winter’s eve with a glass of wine and work my way through the recommended equipment section from selections off my cookbook shelf.

However, I spent many years snorting at the cookbook authors who sang the praises of the mortar and pestle. With a fine and dandy Cuisinart sitting on my shelf, it seemed a pointless anachronism. Any recipe that said it could be done in a mortar and pestle gave a food processor alternative. So, fey I thought.

Then in July I was in San Francisco for a wedding and in the process of meandering the city I came across a cast iron mortar and pestle with a capacity of about a quart. It was true love the second I picked it up. It seemed a ridiculous purchase, so I left it. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I went back a dragged it home.

Incredibly satisfying. A few twists and its able to crush a handful of peppercorns to make a paste for seared tuna steaks or gentle garlic for aioli or toasted sesame seeds into miso for goma.

Kate's Excellent Lunchtime Adventure

Indian food has long befuddled me and I would often say I didn't like it particularly well. In part it was a texture thing--there seems to be an awful lot of softness-- and in part a basic lack of understanding about how things worked.

If I go out to eat, most places I feel like I can read through the menu and have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to wind up with. There are periodic suprises (like an infamous dinner in Budapest where I wound up with a pork chop topped with canned fruit cocktail and smothered in cheese) but for the most part I feel like I know enough about food and cooking that I can anticipate what will please my palate after reading a description.

This has not worked out for me very well with Indian food though. I'd order something and find my plate to be not really what I wanted and my neighbors' meals always seeming like a better choice. It was really hard for me to figure out what something was going to taste like with just a regional or stylistic name, not that a list of spices would have been much help. I had some really amazing Indian food in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia where I'd go out hiking in the morning for hours and then come back to a banana leaf curry lunch where I'd get rice and dal, three veg dishes, lime pickle and nan for $2. Stunningly good but I had no idea how any of it worked.

So, I resolved that before I could really say I wasn't very fond of Indian food I would have to learn how it works and how to make it. First I picked up a couple cookbooks and next I went to the bulk spice counter and stocked up with mysterious goods like fenugreek and cardamom pods. A few days ago I made some ghee and read through the Indian section in James Peterson's Sauces which was short but a great overview of how to put together a Indian style dish and in what ways the technique is similar to Western cooking and how it differs.

Today it was time to make something. I started simple, just a basic dal which seems to be the touchstone. I sauteed an onion, added spice once it was golden and then lentils and water and a pinch of salt which hung out covered on the stove until soft. A whirl of the immersion blender and then stirred in slivered garlic and cardamom sauteed in ghee.

Had it for lunch over basmati with a mango lassi. And it was good. And there's leftovers for tomorrow.

Chicken Wisdom

It is awfully hard to be mad, or even indignant, with the world if your day involves a roast chicken. Particularly if the day also excludes polite company so that you can stand in the kitchen hovering over the roasting pan picking with your fingers at the too hot chicken fresh from the oven, wincing at the hot flesh but knowing that the reward is the freed hot oysters dragged through a bowl of aioli and popped in your mouth.

Periodically I've run into a well meaning article on roast chicken that recommends roasting the bird and then not consuming the skin so that your meal is healthier. This is American puritanical tomfoolery about food at its absolute most offensive. Can you imagine: pulling a bird with its skin crisp and brown and gold and perfect for peeling off and letting your mouth drown its flavor and ...leaving it behind. So stupid. And a prime example of how something "good for you" is not good for anything about you.

Cabbagey Bits

I moved over into Guatemala for a few days. Upon my arrival in town with wild hair and dirt in my ears from taking the chicken bus from out of a national park in El Salvador across the border and into the country I plopped down at a comidora outside the bus station with a fierce hunger and ordered up some grilled chicken. My plate arrived with a pile of fresh tortillas, a splash of a mild chili sauce over the chicken, guacomole on the side and pile of a cabbage based relish slightly pickled with lots of cilantro. Good stuff.

I've never really associated cabbage with food from Central America. It seems so Slavic or Northern European to be eaten in the dark of winter while bundled in heavy clothes rather than part of cuisine otherwise laden with things that dangle from tropical trees. However, I've been finding it is pretty common here particularly in the local street stall places.

In El Salvador the pupusa stands typically serve up the pupusas with a tomato based sauce (smooth though, not chunky like a Noth American salsa) and then on the tables there are big jars of a slightly fermented cabbage based relish wih lots of chili, a bit like Korean kim chi.

The uniting plant...

okay, Cultantro seems to be following me. The place where I am staying in Santa Ana, El Salvador has a living room full of art, comfy couches and a beautiful garden. This morning over coffee I was talking to the owner about various plants out there. He goes over and plucks a leaf out the ground for me to sniff and lo and behold! It is the saw toothed culantro once again. Apparantly used in soups here.

Mango Madness

So, I find myself in El Salvador. These things happen you know.

It is here that I had my first mango. Granted I had had the things that arrive in North American markets that pass for mangoes. There is even a seasonal type that shows up at the Mexican market in Chicago that is smaller than the stereotypical but has a creamy rather than stringy texture and is generally pretty impressive. However, yesterday I had a mango that I fallen from a tree.

I went over a retrieved if from the grass, peeled back its skin and...oh my. Totally different creature. Warm from the sun, falling apart with ripeness and oozing juice. It dripped down my chin and arms, bits of the flesh falling to the ground until I was left dragging my teeth along the seed.

I started my day with another one, standing in my nightgown on the porch outside my room leaning over the railing so that the juice would fall on the ground rather than the floor and looking a the lake below and hazy mountains on the horizon.

Other interesting things to eat so far:
-Whole fresh fish with cilantro and lime grilled until the skin is black but the inside flesh is still soft and white.
-Tortillas here are all made by hand with maza flour so they are smaller, thicker and softer than the ones at home. They get stuffed with cheese and other goodness here and thrown on a grill and become pupasas.

Cilantro Mystery Solved!

Okay, the long leafed thing that smelled like cilantro but did not look like from the early post on Asian style broth...

Got it.

Thanks to a little sidebar article in Saveur I have ided it as Culantro. Erybgium foetidum. It is related to cilantro but native to the West Indies and goes by pak chi farang in Thai (yep that's "farang" just like the backpackers get called, it means foriegn) ngo fai in Vietnamese.

Ahh, food geekiness supreme.

Old Shirts

As of late I have been listening to the White Album. First record. This was my favorite album in 3rd grade (don't ask me about record two...after years of listening to record one in college I was shocked, SHOCKED, to find out that "Revolution" was on the White Album. I thought everything that mattered ended at "Julia" anyhow...) and it is massively soothing to me like slipping into an old shirt.

In the kitchen, there are two things that serve the same role in my life. Spaghetti Carbonara and Oatmeal. They work a certain way. They are a part of my fabric. I never order them in resaurants because, frankly, they never do it right. It will always disappoint me. I don't care about record two or variations.

To make oatmeal:

Put on the side one, record one of the White Album.

Per serving...
Throw in a pan:
Half cup oats
Half cup MILK
Half cup water
Raisins (can throw in other types of other dry fruit if one feels upitty)

Cook until it looks right. Turn of the heat. Let sit. Top with brown sugar. Be morally superior to the world.

Spaghetti Carbonara
Put on Dylan, Nashville Skyline

Per serving:
One room temp egg
Two strips bacon
Onion
Parmesan
Parsley
White Wine
Noodles

Boil some water. Cook the bacon 'til the fat renders, put the noodles in the water and the onion in the bacon pan. Pour a glass of wine. Stir the onions now and then. Warm a bowl with hot water. Break the egg(s) in it. Break it with a fork and mix in the parm, parsley and fresh pepper and a pinch of salt. As the onions get golden pour in the rest of your wine and pour yourself a fresh glass. Let the wine clean out the brown bits in the onion pan, take off the heat and stir into the egg(s). Drain your pasta and stir into the eggy, bacon goodness.

Dig in, and be SO SO happy you never followed your college friends into veganism and that you aren't kosher .

Cold Air and Hot Noodles

Today is one of those shocking Midwestern winter days that living here requires forgetting about during the interveneing seasons: blindingly bright sun, cloudless deep blue sky...and minus 25 Faherenheit windchill. So it's an indoorsy sort of day. I flirted with the notion of putting down my earflaps and going to the hardware store and getting the supplies to paint my kitchen a Morroccan blue to set off my foxy new red enameled grill pan...but resisted.

I supposed I could do something fruitful like tackle the horrific tangle that is the front closet. Instead I put on the new Beth Orton album have been tinkering in the kitchen. From digging around in the cupboard and the veggie bin I wound up with a massively satisfying bowl of soba noodles in hot broth with a little daikon, mushroom and spinach. Seasoned with a sprinkle of chili and a drizzle of dark seasame oil.

Lately, I've been a bit obessive about the notion of always having dashi in the fridge. Maybe it finally dawned on me that it's about as hard to make as a cup of tea. Maybe it's the fact that last week I figured out to make proper goma at home...


Alas, I am afraid my recent Japanesey kick isn't doing much in fulfilling my New Year's resolution to sort out how Indian food works...but so be it. Oh, and you know that business about brewing green tea with lower temp. water than regular black tea? I had always dismissed this information as terribly obsessive and had sort of let it slide but know what, it's totally true. Gets rid of the bitterness and hay-bail lick quality of green tea. I brewed a pot yesterday afternoon with lower heat water and the variety that had been sitting in the cupboard that I'd rejected as too strong and bitter was perfect, same trick different green tea type this afternoon was just right with the brothy noodles. Huh.

Miso Magic

It never fails to amaze me how fermented soybeans stirred into a broth made of fish flakes and kelp is somehow deeply nummy. Although I was raised in a family of good cooks, being based in rural southern Iowa were green onions were considered specialty produce pretty much meant my exposure to the delights of miso came later in life. But I have embraced them wholeheartedly.

I just slurpped down a bowl of fat udon noodles with a few shitakes and some tofu that I'd let sit in a bit of dark sesame oil and soy sauce swimming in a miso-laced dashi. Less than five minutes of really doing anything in the kitchen and a wee bit of waiting. mmm.

On Sunday I also released miso magic on friends who came for dinner by pulling out a miso glazed salmon. It's a dish that I make for myself fairly regularly and the only "recipe" I've come up with that has what I consider a secret recipe (hint, it's not the miso). It makes me feel rather sneaky and clever. Also served as a starter a tricky cribbed from a copy of Food and Wine that was sitting around at Christmas: grind together corse salt and Lapsang Souchong tea and sprinkle on edamame. Goodness abounds.

ROI

Businessy folks like to talk about "Returns on Investment" when trying to decide if they're going to pony up the cash or not. In the kitchen, I sometimes function on a similar principle but thinking of time as my resource rather than cash. I have little to no interest in investing my time and effort on something like fruit carving, which is pretty but pays out low dividends in increased tastiness (which is my primary motivator after all) but I'm willing to hang out in the kitchen for extended periods if it's going to payoff.

I'm convinced that caramelized onions are one of the best investments out there. (Gosh, if anyone pulls up this post after Googling "investment strategy" I'm awful sorry, this won't help your bottom line at all but reading on might not be bad for your "quality of life.")

Doing them well requires about an hour and a half. Granted, you aren't actively doing things but you need to be around so you don't wind up with a charred mass.

In return for my time, however, I wind up with a pile of sweet savory oniony goodness that keeps well in the fridge. So, when I come home late from work and class I go to the kitchen and boil water. I put in whole wheat noodles and pour myself a glass of wine. When my noodles are done I drain them and put them back in the same pan with a little butter, a little rosemary, big spoonfuls of caramelized onion and blue cheese. Then it gets slightly warmed and stirred. It's filling and nummy and takes less time than getting takeout.

And there's still loads of jammy onion left for more lazy pasta or lazy omelets or ambitous tarty bits or...or...

A mighty high payout I sez.

Messing with a Good Thing

I have got Chicken Broth down. Cold. It is something I barely think about: I throw in the goods, let 'er sit, strain, pop in the fridge, defat and boil down to the essence. Then it gets stored in the freezer so I'm ready for rissotto, nummy sauces and soup projects.

So yesterday, what did I decide to do? Tinker. Rather than doing Euro seasoning (thyme, rosemary, parm rind, etc.) I went Asian and did something along these lines:

3 lbs chicken (parts is parts...)
2 stalks celery
1 large carrot
2 shallots
garlic
handful of shitake mushrooms
sliced fresh ginger
peppercorns
star anise
lemongrass
cilantro (actually, Golden Pacific Foods claimed it was cilantro but it was clearly a different variety...long broad leaves rather than the frilly normal kind, scent and flavor though was very similar)

I didn't add salt because I figured with this as the base I could then use it for either SE Asia or Chinese style cooking by adding in either soy or fish sauce.

Then today I pulled out my copy of Hot Sour Salty Sweet and put my broth to good use with a variation of the Silky Coconut Pumpkin Soup.

Sauteed roughly chopped shallots in a bit of oil, threw in diced winter squash, simmer in equal parts of the broth and coconut milk with a few splashes of fish sauce. When the squash was getting tender I added more fish sauce let then settle in and then added a big handful of chiffonaded sort of cilantro.

I'm looking forward to my lunch this week...

Shiny Newness

The blog had been floating around out there with nothin' really going on for, oh, about a year. But I've been cooking and fiddling with food all weekend and I have decided it needed a bit of a revamp. Inspired in part by Miss Mari's cupcake and other antics, in part by listening again to The Splendid Table I cleared out the random unrelated posts from the past and kept only the food related ones...

How exciting! A focus.

So, from here on out I'll try to stay focused on my food adventures. My New Year's resolution this year is to learn to cook Indian style. This is because I have never been a big fan of Indian food, which means I think I just don't know enough about it. I have eaten some really good Indian meals but I have never been very good at figuring out how it all works, so that will likely be a part of the upcoming information.